Review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Piketty’s achievement in his recent book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century is to demonstrate in the language of positivist empiricism—today’s most persuasive idiom—a longstanding truth. It is a reality that most societies have sensed and declared in a variety of ways. It is a dynamic that is seen as antithetical to the American dream and one that classical liberal and neoliberal economic theories have vigorously sought to suppress. While the truth risks being disregarded as cliché, what Piketty shows is that money is power and that, by extension, monetary economies are not inherently level playing fields. One of the ways this has been expressed over the ages is through money’s association with religious discourse and with the realm of the gods.